Diego fell facedown. Slowly, painfully, he rolled over and lay beneath the bright morning sun with his face to the sky. He was panting and tormented by a sudden thirst; he was sweating quicklime and at the same time shivering with the chill of the tomb. He damned the Christian God for abandoning him, and the Great Spirit who instead of offering him a vision, as promised, was mocking him. Diego lost touch with reality, but also with fear. He was floating on a hot wind, as if miraculous air currents were lifting him, spiraling him toward the light. Suddenly elated at the possibility of dying, he relaxed into a perfect peace.
The blistering whirlwind kept rising toward the heavens, then suddenly the wind veered, hurling him like a rock to the depths of an abyss. In a flash of consciousness, before he sank into total delirium, he saw the red eyes of the zorro, looking at him from the other side of death.
For the next few hours, Diego floundered around in the tar pit of his nightmares, and when finally he struggled free and rose to the surface, he remembered only his consuming thirst and the unblinking eyes of the fox. He woke wrapped in a blanket, lighted by the flames of a campfire, and accompanied by Bernardo and White Owl. He was slow to come back to his body, to take inventory of his pains and reach a conclusion.
“The rattlesnake killed me,” he said as soon as he had his voice back.
“You are not dead, son, but you nearly were.” White Owl smiled.
“I did not pass the test, grandmother,” the boy said.
“But you did, Diego,” she informed him. “You passed.”
Bernardo had found Diego and carried him back to the camp. He was on his way to meet White Owl when a fox appeared before him. He had no doubt that it was a signal; it was most unusual for such a nocturnal animal to run between his legs, especially in broad daylight. Instead of obeying his first instinct to hunt it, he stopped and observed it.
The fox did not flee but sat down a short distance away and looked back at Bernardo, ears pricked and snout trembling. Under different circumstances, Bernardo would simply have noted the animal’s strange behavior, but he was in a visionary state, with his senses fever-hot and his heart open to signs. Unhesitatingly, he followed where the fox wanted to lead, and only a short distance farther he came upon Diego’s inert body. He saw his brother’s monstrously swollen leg and knew immediately what had happened. He did not have an instant to waste; he threw Diego over his shoulder like a sack of flour and hurried straight to White Owl, who applied herbs to her grandson’s leg that made him sweat out the poison. Finally he opened his eyes.
“The fox saved you. That zorro is your totemic animal, your spiritual guide,” she explained. “You must cultivate its skill, its cleverness, its intelligence. Your mother is the moon, and your home, the cave. Like the fox, you will discover what cannot be seen in the dark, you will disguise yourself, and you will hide by day and act by night.”
“To do what?” asked Diego, confused.
“One day you will know you cannot rush the Great Spirit. In the meantime, prepare, so you will be ready when that day comes,” his Indian grandmother instructed him.
Out of prudence, the boys kept the rites White Owl had conducted secret. The colony considered the traditions of the Indians to be absurd, if not savage, acts of ignorance. Diego did not want any whispers to reach his father. He confessed his strange experience with the fox to Regina, without going into detail. No one asked Bernardo anything, since his muteness made him invisible, an unexpectedly advantageous situation. People talked and behaved in front of him as if he did not exist, giving him the opportunity to observe and learn about the duplicity of human beings. He began to practice his skill at reading people’s actions, and in that way discovered that words do not always correspond to intentions. He realized that bullies generally are easy to cow, that the loudest are the least sincere, that arrogance is a quality of the ignorant, and that flatterers tend to be vicious.
Through systematic and quiet observation, he learned to read character, and he applied that knowledge to protecting Diego, who was trusting by nature: he could not imagine in others defects he himself did not have.
The boys did not see the black foal or the fox again. Bernardo thought that he sometimes caught a glimpse of Tornado galloping in the middle of a herd of wild horses, and once in the woods Diego came upon a cave with a clutch of newborn fox kits. They could not, however, relate either of these encounters to the visions attributed to the Great Spirit.
In any case, White Owl’s ritual marked a milestone. Both of the boys had the impression that they had crossed a threshold and left childhood behind. They did not as yet feel they were men, but they knew that they were taking the first steps along the hard road of manhood.
Together they awakened to the urgent demands of carnal desire, much less tolerable than the vague, sweet affection Bernardo had felt for Lightin-the-Night since he was ten years old. It never occurred to them to satisfy their yearnings among the willing Indian girls in White Owl’s tribe, where the rules the missionaries imposed on the neophytes were unknown. Diego held back because of his great respect for his grandmother, and Bernardo was reined in by his puppy love for Lightin-the-Night. Bernardo had no hope that his love would be returned; he realized that the one he loved had grown into a woman, and was courted by half a dozen braves who traveled from distant tribes to bring her gifts, while he was a clumsy adolescent with nothing to offer, besides being mute as a hare. Neither did the boys call on the beautiful mulatta or the more ordinary girls in the house of pleasure in Pueblo de los Angeles. They feared them more than a runaway bull; with their crimson-painted mouths and their dead jasmine scent, they were creatures from an unknown land. Like all the other boys of their age except Carlos Alcazar, who boasted about having passed the test they looked at those women from afar, with veneration and fear. Diego went with the other boys from “good” families to the Plaza de Armas at the hour of the paseo. With every circuit of the plaza he passed girls of his social class and his age strolling in the opposite direction; they cast sidelong glances, their faces half hidden by a fan or a mantilla, while the boys sweated out their impossible love in their Sunday suits. They didn’t talk back and forth, but some, the most daring, asked the alcalde for permission to serenade beneath the girls’ balconies, an idea that made Diego cringe with embarrassment partly because the alcalde was his own father. He could imagine, however, that he might want to try that method in the future, so every day he practiced romantic ballads on his mandolin.
Alejandro de la Vega took enormous satisfaction from the fact that his son, whom he had thought to be hopelessly irresponsible, was finally turning into the heir he had dreamed of from the day the boy was born.